windy nights

Windy Nights

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Whenever the moon and stars are set,

      Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet,

      A man goes riding by.

Late in the night when the fires are out,

Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

      And ships are tossed at sea,

By, on the highway, low and loud,

      By at the gallop goes he.

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again. 

When I was a child, my mom used to read us this poem out of an old copy of Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. While I say that mom read it to us, I should say that she would sing it to us in a minor key that eerily reflected the haunting nature of a windy night. The poem itself was illustrated with what I remember to be a watercolor of trees thrashing about in a gray-black night, a yellowing moon peaking out of the clouds, and a black-robed highwayman racing his horse past the trees.

I was a particular scaredy cat as a child. All things scared me: strangers, not strangers, the dark, things I couldn't see, things I had only imagined, creaking floor boards, storms of any sort, dogs, the basement, large domesticated farm animals, the attic, playing in the trees and losing sight of the house, being away from my mom, to name just a few. I was really quite a wreck. I was also blessed - and when I say blessed, I do mean blessed - with an overactive imagination. You would think that between my tendency for mostly irrational fears and my overly well-developed imagination that I would have disliked a poem such as "Windy Nights," but I didn't. I remember loving it even though it scared me just a little.

The trees and moon in the picture could have been painted from the trees in front of our house. The trees I could see from my bedroom window. Growing up on the South Dakota plains, windy nights were generally the rule rather than the exception. So Stevenson's "Windy Nights" were very close to home for me. They didn't just exist on the pages of an old children's book or in my imagination, but they were right out side my room, and I could watch them from my bed as the branches of the old cottonwoods thrashed in the wind.

As I grew older, the windy nights and the storms that sometimes accompanied them began to scare me less and less. Rather than becoming terrified of their seemingly chaotic rage, I became in awe of their power and fierceness. I intellectually know that strong winds and storms can do great damage, and I don't particularly like to be out driving in them; however, if I'm home with no obligation to go out, I find I rather like the sound of the storm raging outside. I find it oddly soothing.

Last night a storm blew through the valley with winds gusting up to 60 mph. I had checked the storm warnings for the area, and seeing that the prediction was mostly for a lot of wind with a possible thunderstorm and maybe some hail thrown in for good measure, I decided to crack open a bottle of wine and watch a movie. No need to panic, right? It's only wind. When the lights started to flicker a bit, I dug out my flashlight and lit a couple candles since I had heard from a friend that the lights had already gone out on the other side of town. I figured we would probably follow suit since the storm wasn't going to let up for quite a while. And when the lights did finally go out and stay out, I went to bed. Nothing would be gained from staying awake and fretting over a storm greatly out of my control.

So I drifted off to sleep with the sound of the howling wind and the thrashing trees and perhaps a highwayman or two galloping about. This morning the world is little worse for wear. There are a few small twigs and branches and some leaves  on the ground and evidence that the wind decided to make sport of some flower pots, but otherwise I think we all survived our windy night.